#SAPTechEd Lecture of the Week: BI4 Sizing – What You Need to Know (since TechEd)

In case you missed it (or you didn’t want to stand), I presented Sizing of SAP BusinessObjects BI4 at TechEd in Las Vegas last fall (October 2013). The goal of the talk was to present what’s new when sizing BI4. There was content for all audience members: those migrating from XI 3.1, those migrating from BI4.0 to BI4.1 and those proactively re-sizing their deployments.

As the support for new platforms and data sources has evolved and matured in BI4 from 4.0 to 4.1, so has the sizing guidance. Introduced in May 2013, a new BI4 Sizing Guide was introduced that provided a more general methodology. Along with that came guidance for sizing related to more data sources including SAP BW and HANA. As always you should get the latest BI4 Sizing Guide from the BI Sizing microsite: www.sap.com/bisizing

I like to do live demos and I like to show off things you might not have seen. I saved some performance tips for the end of the session, where I showed two BI4.1 deployments running side-by-side: one with the Apache Split applied. That splits Web content delivery up, having Apache’s Web server deliver the static BI4 Web content, leaving Tomcat to only have to deal with the dynamic BI content. It’s a win-win-win for customers: less load on Tomcat, less wire traffic due to greater compression by Apache and a faster experience for end-users due to better caching and content aging.

New since TechEd there has been another round of updates to the BI4 Sizing Guide. Nothing major and no methodology changes – just updated details such as recommended maximum connections for WebI, CMS tuning and performance guidance for JDBC connectivity in Universes (which includes reporting on HANA).

Also new is a simplified description of the Apache Split procedure covering BI4.1 and the latest version of Apache.